IP Phones – Where’s the Smartness?

We’ve been deploying IP Telephony for over a decade now. And one of the most frequent questions we’re asked by our clients is about the feature advantages of IP telephones over Analog.

You’ve probably heard this, too. After taking a tour of the standard call handling operations on their newly installed IP phone, the client wants to know:

What ELSE can my IP phone do? Is that it?

Given the initial setup costs of IP telephony, new users are often expecting something flashier – a desk phone with advanced computer capabilities that behaves more like their smartphone!

The standard call handling operations of Transfer, Hold, Conference, Parking, Do Not Disturb, Ring Back, and Call Waiting tend to be disappointing after you’ve made the significant investment of going VOIP over Analog and paid $110-$120+ USD per IP phone.

And fair enough.

As communication installation professionals, we understand the potential of the TCP/IP stack.
So why aren’t the IP phones we’re installing delivering a range of features more comparable to a mobile phone? Especially given that both employ SIP protocol?

The phonebook on a standard IP phone versus your mobile phone is an excellent example of this untapped potential. IP phones come with a ‘phonebook’ capable of storing a couple hundred contacts -- but it’s local to the phone, and must be manually updated by the end user. Mobile phones, on the other hand, can effortlessly sync thousands of contacts from your various contact lists (LinkedIn, Google Contacts, and more) into a single, unified phonebook. Click, click, done.

But the IP phone should be capable of this easy contact syncing, too, right?
Absolutely. And that’s where Aptus FonB comes in.

FonB was created to bring together personal and corporate contacts from:

And even contacts from Highrise CRM
… Into a single, comprehensive phonebook that’s automatically synced company wide and available via the desktop IP phone.

(Yet this ‘synced’ phonebook is ALSO unique to each user based on the privacy of their personal contacts!)

It’s a highly practical solution with an impressive list of long-term cost savings.
And even better still, the next time you’ve got a client asking, ‘What ELSE can it do?’ - you can give them a demo of FonB features that will provide the instant gratification they were expecting from their new IP phones... without investing a lot more personal time and effort on the install.

To learn more about how Aptus FonB can help you increase client satisfaction by injecting smartphone capabilities into the standard desktop IP phone, visit: aptus.com